BA Hackathon 2014 – Looking at the Big Picture

Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies – it happens when society adopts new behaviors.

Clay Shirky

As part of a campaign promoting open government and innovation, Buenos Aires City Hall hosts an annual hackathon bringing together tech, design, and government in search of real solutions to real problems.

Last year R/GA Buenos Aires participated by providing a platform that allowed the City Hall Culture Ministry to track and manage street art installations.

For this year’s hackathon, the challenge was hacking a big problem that every large city faces – garbage.

We created a brainstorming team including Lucas Rudi, Santiago Marín, Nicolás Viegas, Bruno Lazzaro, Tom Roggero, Sergio Serrano, Ivan Roumec and Lourdes Montano.  Our initial solutions were high-tech, for example hacking an Arduino, NodeJs, and WebSockets  to create a Smart Trash Bin that reacts when you throw something away.

But on the day of the event, environmental scientists Juan Calvo, Juliana Vivar, Rodrigo Rapport provided a key insight: waste separation at the source is one of the biggest challenges the city faces.   So how can get citizens into the habit of separating recycling by giving citizens an incentive to recycle correctly?

We worked with the team to create a formula that converts each pound of paper, cardboard, glass, plastic or aluminum to a number that measures its impact on the Recycle, Reuse and Reduce cycle. With this formula we were able to motivate citizens to compete and earn points every time they contribute.

The result is a solution called “Tacho Piola” , a network of smart bins that will be placed in different spots across the city where citizens can adopt the new habit, compete with their neighbors, and earn points from the City Hall.  Points can be exchanged for rewards.

We created a data visualization that displays the activity from all the neighborhoods using the formula created by environmental sciences.  We’re proud to say the project earned Tacho Piola the award for Sensor Innovation.

Ultimately, hacking the garbage was not the real challenge. Changing behaviors by leveraging the right interactions made this hackathon a big win for the team and for City Hall.

Helping people evolve will always be the right way to solve these types of problems.  Make it count.

You can find the sourcecode for this project in github